Commercial Programs

Fritz 11

You are holding Fritz in your hands, the program that for many years now has fascinated the chess world. It played against the legendary Garry Kasparov in New York and in 2006 beat world champion Vladimir Kramnik 4:2 in a big public match in Bonn, Germany. Millions of fans followed these great duels between man and machine and were delighted by the world class games that they produced. But don't be afraid - Fritz has a different side to its personality. The program will help you along during the game, with numerous sophisticated coaching functions, adjusting its playing strength to exactly match that of any opponent. It graphically displays threats and plans, and provides full opening statistics. For beginners Fritz will explains moves and positions, or warn you of dangers and of errors you are committing. It has instructive training modules and amusing handicap levels. For club and tournament players Fritz has long become a trusted friend and indispensable advisor, helping them to study their games and find new opening ideas for their next tournaments. A database with more than a million games provides the basis for state-of-the-art analysis. Even Garry Kasparov has used Fritz on a regular basis. How often have you attended personal grandmaster lectures or training sessions? With its Chess Media System Fritz brings the world's greatest chess players into your living room, in full high resolution video and sound and a synchronised graphic chessboard. Listen to Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Viktor Korchnoi, Alexei Shirov or (former world champion) Rustam Kasimdzhanov while they explain important openings and ideas that lead to success. A host of famous chess teacher provide instruction in more mundane subjects, like opening traps, middlegame strategy, or endgame skills. Video running time: more than 14 (!) hours! Fritz makes it easy for you to play against other human beings, at any time, day or night. It provides you with a one-click connection to the largest chess community in the world, Playchess.com (1 year access). You can play quick and informal games at any level, take part in tournaments, or attend live lectures and training sessions. You can also watch great international events, which are broadcast live on the server, and you can discuss the moves with players and Grandmasters from all over the world. It is an experience you will not want to miss.

Deep Fritz 10 - Multiprocessor Version

You are holding in your hands a copy of Fritz, the program that for many years now has fascinated the chess world. Whether it was the match against World Champion Vladimir Kramnik in Bahrain in 2002, or against Garry Kasparov in New York in 2003, or the revenge match against World Champion Kramnik in the National Art Gallery in Bonn, Germany, in 2006 - the pitting of wits of the strongest players on the planet against the world's finest chess playing program has generated unprecedented media attention and fired the imagination of people from all walks of life. "Man vs Machine" has become one of the great themes of our time.

New in FRITZ 10: enhanced and improved chess engine developed especially for the 2006 Kramnik vs Fritz match; extended openings book; updated database; dynamic graphic tips for attack and defence; improved graphics and move entry on the 2D board; new high resolution 3D piece sets in classical wood; live display of the thinking process on the chessboard; more efficient position analysis.

New chess server features: additional ranking lists, full rankings for all players, filters for challengers with bad Internet connections, new and simple video conference function, bullet lists in the engine room, animated global weather display, direct link to Google Earth.

Shredder 11

No other program in the past years was able to win as many world championship titles as Shredder. The new version, Shredder 11, is stronger than any previous version, with its performance improved by about 100 Elo points. This was achieved by implementing more effecient search techniques and a new evaluation function which delivers more realistic assessments. Shredder still likes to go on the attack, but is not as speculative as previous versions. The evaluation of passed pawns has also been greatly improved. All of this leads to more reliable and realistic results during your analysis with the computer. A completely new feature is the "Opening Advisor", which allows Shredder to handle opening lines much better without the help of an openings book.

Junior 10

Junior 10 is the new 2006 Computer Chess World Champion. The program, written by the Israeli programmers Amir Ban and Shy Bushinsky, narrowly defeated its main rival, the many times world champion program Shredder, at the Computer Chess World Championship which was held during the Chess Olympiad in Turin, Italy. Junior impressed experts with its extraordinary dynamic play, and remained undefeated in this event. Junior 10 has its own special search techniques and evaluation functions, which makes it different to any other chess program. In the latest version we see the rigorous continuation of a development that a3ted with Junior 7 and has led to a unique and creative playing style. It a3ted with the famous bishop sacrifice on h2 in a match against Garry Kasparov and now has been honed to perfection in Version 10. In spite of their success in computer chess tournaments the programmers of Junior are not primarily concerned with beating other chess programs. Instead they have developed Junior into an instrument that enables human beings to gain new insights and understanding in the game of chess. A good example is the very pronounced understanding of compensation, which allows its users to explore new possibilities of sacrifice attacks and sharp dynamic play.
Junior 10 offers you 12 months of free access to the Playchess.com server. You also get the latest enhanced and improved Junior openings book.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Pentium III, 128 MB RAM, Win98 SE, Win2000, WinXP, DVD-drive, Soundcard.

Zap!Chess

Zap!Chess is the commercial version of Zappa, the 2005 World Computer Chess Champion. The CD contains two versions: "Paderborn" and "Reykjavik". Reyjavik is the version that won the World Championship; Paderborn includes some ideas from my work at Illinois. I myself do not know which one is better; you'll have to find that out for yourself.
The style of the program reflects my background as a computer engineer. Rather than developing clever search tricks that may or may not work, I concentrated on getting the most out of modern hardware. Zap!Chess contains one of the best parallel implementations in the world to run efficiently on multiple CPU systems, and it also uses 64-bit machines to their full potential. The program contains large amounts of chess knowledge, and like most modern programs it is tuned fairly aggressively - it knows where the opponent's king lives. This gives it an exciting style without being unsound. While the program is optimized for long time controls and big hardware, don't despair if you own a smaller system. Both versions come with an implementation of Singular Extensions, the famous Deep Blue search algorithm. They are disabled by default, but they increase the tactical strength of the program at the cost of positional strength.